Page:Ruppelt - The Report on Unidentified Flying Objects.djvu/102



There was one last appendix. It was entitled “Summary of the Evaluation of Remaining Reports.” What the title meant was, We have 23 per cent of the reports that we can’t explain but we have to explain them because we don’t believe in flying saucers. This appendix contributed greatly to the usage of the analogy to the Dark Ages, the age of “intellectual stagnation.”

This appendix was important—it was the meat of the whole report. Every UFO sighting had been carefully checked, and those with answers had been sifted out. Then the ones listed in “Summary of the Evaluation of Remaining Reports” should be the best UFO reports—the ones with no answers.

This was the appendix that the newsmen grabbed at when the Grudge Report was released. It contained the big story. But if you’ll check back through old newspaper files you will hardly find a mention of the Grudge Report.

I was told that reporters just didn’t believe it when I tried to find out why the Grudge Report hadn’t been mentioned in the newspapers. I got the story from a newspaper correspondent in Washington whom I came to know pretty well and who kept me filled in on the latest UFO scuttlebutt being passed around the Washington press circles. He was one of those humans who had a brain like a filing cabinet; he could remember everything about everything. UFO’s were a hobby of his. He remembered when the Grudge Report came out; in fact, he’d managed to get a copy of his own. He said the report had been quite impressive, but only in its ambiguousness, illogical reasoning, and very apparent effort to write off all UFO reports at any cost. He, personally, thought that it was a poor attempt to put out a “fake” report, full of misleading information, to cover up the real story. Others, he told me, just plainly and simply didn’t know what to think—they were confused.

And they had every right to be confused.

As an example of the way that many of the better reports of the 1947-49 period were “evaluated” let’s take the report of a pilot who tangled with a UFO near Washington, D.C., on the night of November 18, 1948.

At about 9:45 EST I noticed a light moving generally north to south over Andrews AFB. It appeared to be one continuous, glowing white light. I thought it was an aircraft with only one